by A. D. Bloom
The Dreadnought's spin made Altair rise almost instantly on the shallow-curved hull. The raking light cast long shadows over the line of five mechanized Squidies advancing ahead of Lucy and her squad. She and her Marines popped up from the blast-wale where they'd taken cover and fired 50mm sabot and wide-bore bursts of x-ray laser fire from the over/under barrels of their MA-48s. The salvo caught one of the mechanized alien battle-suits high in the chest and knocked it backwards in the low-gees. It fell venting gas, but once the other four saw where the shots came from, the mechanized Squidies laid down so much fire with their hand cannons that Lucy's squad had to press themselves against the bottom of the shallow crater while its forward lip exploded with alien shells and burning shrapnel.
"They need help!" Ram said, "Hollis, Perch, Shojo!"
"Mr. Devlin, I've got LOS on those Squidies," Vikko said from Tick One's top turret. "Someone just cover my ten o'clock while I hose 'em."
"I've got your 10," Shojo said. "Hose 'em, Vikko."
Vikko swung the turret around and spat ten-meter tongues of fire out over Ram's head. The standard 140mm, armor piercing sabot ripped big, jagged holes in the alien battle-suits and sent them skittering across the hull into the base of a gun tower like gigantic, broken crabs.
Lucy waved. Ram looked over his shoulder and saw Vikko wave back to her with a big goofy smile on his face. Shojo made a wheezing noise on comms, and when Ram looked that way, he saw the man's shattered faceplate venting atmo from a massive hole. Ram slammed both hands over it until so much boiling blood came out with the gas that he had to give up trying to keep it in.
Then, he saw the Squidy that must have shot Shojo. It was the one he'd been covering on Vikko's ten o'clock. It wore a regular Squidy exosuit, the kind that looked like hose and sack with a visor in the center. It was down in a blast crater off to the side of Tick 6. It crumpled itself down as another one unfolded itself and rose with something like a fat, 2-meter section of pipe in its garden hose arms.
Ram's Honma & Voss drilled a hole in the Squidy's center 'body' mass so big he could see right through it, but the thing still fired its pipe weapon. A shower of sparks erupted out the back end and a geyser of green fire shot out the front. Everything in a line between the weapon and Vikko's turret turned to a burning, green blur. For a fraction of a second, the alien stream splashed off the turret's armor like liquid, and then, it melted its way inside. Tick One's turret filled with fire. Ram caught terrible flashes of Vikko thrashing against the inside of the canopy as he burned up in his suit.
Hollis shouted, "Tse! Report!" Tse was inside with the drill crew. No answer. "Tse!"
"This is Tse." He spoke utterly monotone as if he'd been stunned. "Turret is gone. Vikko is gone. We're still drilling..."
The drifting Dreadnought's spin turned it to face away from Altair, and the battle was cast in darkness. "This is Ram Devlin to all squads. We've got to push the Squidies further away from the Ticks. We're going on the offensive."
Chapter 9
Hiding wouldn't do Tipperary any good. The Squidies knew the breaching ship would head for the Altair-Barnard Transit so the aliens would be doing their best to get there first. With that in mind, Tipperary and her escorts gave up stealth and flew for speed.
Off to the port side and low, through the frost on the cockpit canopy, Charon's ruptured reactors were easy to spot. Jordo scraped at the ice crystals with his glove to see her better. The fat transport was now a radioactive debris field floating with the alien Dreadnought on a slow path up and out of the ecliptic. Jordo heard voices on the emergency channel whenever two of the larger chunks collided. "This is Edvard Gibbs of SCS Charon. We are under attack. Please help us. Please."
"Blessed Father who art in Heaven..."
"Please! Help us!"
A few of the voices even sobbed. They had to be recordings. Jordo told himself they had to be.
The Dreadnought drifted 10Ks from Charon's debris. It spun slowly. The engines were out, but its guns still worked. It took a few shots at Tipperary, but it couldn't hit her at that range.
Jordo zoomed in with his helmet to watch the skull-painted side of the Dreadnought spin towards them. He thought he saw flashes on the hull. The XO and Lucy Elan were down there waiting for the Lancers to save the day.
Gusher spoke fast. "Bandit, Bandit. Hostile contacts! Bearing 041, mark 079..." Jordo looked up at his 2 o'clock, up 11 degrees. They looked like flying stars, tiny and distant. They were too far out and faint to see the hulls. Zoomed in they looked like school of fuzzy, pink comets in echelon. "Looks like six, enemy 3-plane elements making for the transit point."
"Eighteen red bandits."
"12 Bitzers vs. 18 Red Bandits...." Jordo said it under his breath. The enemy was faster. They turned harder. On any other day, a numerical advantage of at least 2:1 (or better) is what the Lancers would need to take the alien aces on with any hope of success. 36 fighters is what Jordo wanted. He had 12.
"Well, bring 'em on!" Paladin said. He was ready. "What's our ETA to the Transit point?"
"9 minutes," Jordo told him. He was already gesturing through the less familiar menus on the OMNI NAV flight computer to confirm what he suspected.
Dirty actually beat him to it. "The Squidies are going to make it there before we do by a good thirty seconds. We gotta engage 'em."
"Lancer 1-1 to Tipperary. We've got company on the way to the transit point and at this rate they will arrive before we do. Can you move that thing any faster?"
"Negative, Lancer, 1-1. In fact, we're going to have to slow down soon. We're going to have to T 'n B for deceleration."
"Turn and burn? What? Why?"
"We can't breach space from more than 5Ks out and it takes a good fifteen seconds to do it. Sometimes more. If we don't stop, we'll just slam into the fireworks and burn up."
"Roger that, Tipperary," Jordo said. Dammit.
"Just one of those Squidy fighters could put us out of commission."
Jordo said, "Don't you worry about the enemy fighters, Tipperary. We'll take care of Squidyman's fighters for you."
"Malta to Lancer 1-1. We have orders to send our warspites with you."
Paladin said, "What? Torpedoes?"
"Negative, negative, Malta," Jordo said. "Fission-tipped warspites won't catch the enemy fighters and when they det, they'll be just as dangerous to us as the Squidies. Save your torps."
"They've got IFF recognition," Malta said. "They won't chase you."
"We don't need them," Jordo insisted. "We can take the alien fighters without using the torpedoes."
"Sorry, Lancer 1-1... Harry Cozen's orders."
"This is bullshit!" Paladin was out of line, but he was right.
Jordo said, "Cozen wants to make sure."
"And if he has to blow up a few Lancers to get that guarantee, then that's just fine with him?" Dirty said, "That ain't right."
"Quit yer' bitchin'," Jordo said. "We will escort the torps in and we will dodge the blasts. Do it."
The torpedoes approached the Squidies on a course that would intercept them three minutes out from the transit. Without an escort for the warspites, the red bandits would have had no trouble shooting them down, but the Lancers flew ahead of the torpedoes and once inside weapons range, the 151s threw enough shock 'n shell at the Squidies to keep them well-occupied. The alien aces picked off a few torps, but they were too busy dodging fire and hunting Lancers to hit any more than that.
As they closed, two Squidies threw particle beams across Jordo's flightpath, and he rolled up and cut across to the outside of the formation. This was the first time he'd ever engaged in air-to-air combat with Dirty's compound speeding his mind and it almost stunned him how all at once, he saw the angle of the enemy fighters' approach and the flare of all their maneuvering jets at the ends of the queer spikes on their hulls. It an infinitesimal moment, he visualized all their possible maneuvers with such clarity that it was easy to put his fighter in the places they couldn't point their gun
s or deflect their streams to hit him. All they could do was chase him with laggard fire while he dusted another alien ace that had got too fixated on the warspites to see J. 'Jordo' Colt coming for him.
The two formations passed through each other, slicing and stabbing with particle beams and spitting fire. The fighters turned hard in fifty different directions, and the torpedoes chased them, causing chaos. In less than three seconds, the battle degenerated from a dogfight to a furball to complete and utter bedlam. The Squidies lost their formations and their wingmen in the first seconds of the engagement. With Bitzers bearing down on them at the same time as the torpedoes, it didn't matter that the red bandits could outmaneuver and out fly the Lancers because 140mm shells and fighters and torpedoes filled the space around them in all directions and they were overwhelmed.
The Lancers didn't have that problem. Jordo's speeding mind saw all the enemy fighters in the furball at once and picked himself a path that targeted not just one Squidy, but six... then seven... eight... The flightpath through the next nine kills laid itself out in his mind like a golden thread weaving through the furball. His 151 swung to fire at one Squidy and rotated to unload on a second before it blasted for a third and fourth. As he jinked away from one target and picked up the next one, the golden thread weaved itself through the dogfight and showed him the next enemy to attack.
All the Lancers dove and wove through the thick of the enemy unloading at one alien fighter and the next in high-gee arabesques executed like they'd planned these runs for weeks. A pair of bandits fell under hammering fire in front of Paladin before Jordo took one for himself, and he realized the Lancers might be winning.
Jordo could see five steps ahead, but he didn't see the red hull that spun in from nowhere until it was coming down on the top of his cockpit from above, swelling up and turning red, then orange, then white as the reactor inside it fast-melted. To escape, Jordo rotated and blasted a turn so steep that the inertial negation system couldn't compensate for the gees. He slid towards the edge of a blackout and felt his limbs tingle and go numb. All the sounds and voices in his helmet got thin and far off. It seemed like the fighters zoomed past, spitting fire across the end of a dark tunnel. The burning alien detonated fifty-meters to port with a flash, and the plasma and debris that slammed his canopy shook him back into his body. Through the blood-tinted gray haze that hung like a gauze over his eyes, a Squidy fighter tore in front of him big enough to fill his canopy. The moment froze in his mind when he saw how the warspite torpedo about to hit it looked like a great spear stuck in the enemy fighter's side.
In the instant before it detonated, his eye held all the torpedoes at once. They were all as close to their targets as they would get and they were all about to blow.
His visor went opaque to protect his eyes from the detonations and when it cleared, the first thing he saw were the drops of water on the inside of the canopy where the frost had been. On the other side of the wet diamond-pane, red bandits chased Lancers and torps chased Squidies and then the flashes were happening all around them, everywhere. His helmet shuttered and protected his eyes for every blast and there were so many blasts that passing fighters and tracers ticked across his canopy with a stutter to their flight.
Some torpedoes found the enemy, but Jordo swore he saw more than one of his pilots vanish in the flashes. Detonating in the middle of a dense furball like that, the torpedoes took victims more or less at random. It turned the battle into a lottery where death was the only sure winner. Jordo had told the Lancers they could dodge the blasts, but he knew it would end up like this. He told himself they knew it too, but it gutted him to see it happen.
In that game of chance, Death took more Squidies than Lancers. Jordo had to wonder if it was because the Lancers were the ones who flew into battle with a pack of nuclear torpedoes and offered up the sacrifice.
After all the detonations were over, five Lancers and two red bandits remained. "Get some more!" That's what Dirty shouted as she and Paladin gifted Death with the lives of the last two alien pilots.
*****
Five Lancers and the junks flew guard while Tipperary threw her colliding particle streams at the transit point. Like Jordo had seen before, the blossoming, expanding sphere of fire grew until it was a full K wide before the transit opened and showed him the wrong stars – the view from light years away.
Tipperary made for the mouth of the passage while Jordo's head throbbed. The counter in his helmet read 01h 31m 17.05s – almost an hour since he'd climbed into the cockpit. That's when things began to go bad for Dirty and Holdout last time. After an hour, there were no guarantees, Dirty said.
They had to hurry. Already he could feel something changing. It felt like coming over the peak of a mountain and heading down the other side, but he didn't want to go and he couldn't stop and it was infuriating. He knew what came next. He'd seen it happen to Holdout and Dirty. "Anyone feelin' kinda messed up?" Gusher said. "Like... I mean... not like before."
Dirty said. "Stifle it, Gush, you pussy-ass, kill-thief."
Gusher fired his laterals in opposition and rolled his Bitzer around Dirty's fighter. If she hadn't blasted her ass out of his line of travel, then he might have rammed her. No, Jordo thought. There was no 'might' or 'maybe' about it. Gusher had really tried to do it. Just seeing him pull a stunt like that made Jordo want to line Gush up in his crosshairs and give him a taste.
It was starting. There was a very nasty tail-end to the synthetic hormone Dirty had cooked up and it was definitely starting. Remember that, Jordo thought. Remember that and you won't lose control.
The junks followed Tipperary towards the open transit on little blasts from their nacelles. "Malta to Lancer 1-1. No hard feelings about those torpedoes, right. Just orders."
For a second, there was only the warble of alien jamming in the background as the junks slid across his cockpit canopy. "Yeah, Malta," he said through his teeth. "Just orders."
After Tipperary crossed the threshold, and Malta said, "We'll bring the whole damn fleet back with us." Then, she followed the breaching ship into the fire-ringed transit with the rest of the junks, and they were gone.
Once it closed, he said, "Lancers, stay on my wing. We're late to a party on the hull of the Dreadnought."
Chapter Ten
Lucy barked, "All forward squads hold the line!" She and her Marines fired from the shadowy cover of an alien gun tower. They'd pushed forward and fallen back and now, a pair of Squidies in battle suits advanced on them, but Ram and his squad couldn't help her any more than they were.
The half-squad that remained had their hands full keeping the Squidies from maneuvering themselves onto her flank. They were down in a vape crater barely big enough for one man and the Squidies had been pressing hard to overrun them. If they did, Lucy's squad would go down and so would Arroyo's next to her. It would all start to collapse.
"Last grenades!" Hollis threw the two mashers over the lip at the unarmored Squidies. After the flash, pieces of alien exosuits flew over Ram's head.
Lucy repeated her command to 'hold the line' to the Marines in all the forward positions, but Ram knew they couldn't hold out. The Squidies probably knew it too.
While the mechanized Squidies kept Lucy's head down, the 3.5-meter tall, spindle-limbed ones in unarmored exosuits swarmed out from cover and charged across the battle-scarred hull, all squidging together on their garden hose legs like crabs without shells. Ram saw it happening, but all he and his squad could do was send a few sabot that way.
"Mr. Devlin!" Hollis shouted. "Our forward element needs help!"
"I see it!" Ram looked for Pardue and her knuckledragger. "Pardue! Where are you?"
Pardue was already in motion. Her 4-meter-tall knuckledragger bounded right over Ram's position in the crater, headed for Lucy Elan with a 3x3 meter square slab of belt-iron hull plate held high in her forward claws. It looked like a blocky, headless gorilla with a pilot in its chest. After the jump, she hit the jets and flew. When Ram s
aw her shifting the machine left and right as she came down, he knew she was aiming it. Jordo heard himself whisper, "Yes... yes..."
After the top of her arc, one of the Squidies in the armored battle suits saw her coming. It fired and missed and then tried to get away, but wherever it ran, she followed it as she came down. Pardue landed in front of it and brought the piece of hull plate down on top of it. She knocked it to the ground, broken and venting.
She dropped the hull-plate. Before the unarmored Squidies around her could fire into her open-frame suit, she charged them. She swept their spindle thin bodies away five at a time with the knuckle-dragger's herculean metal fists.
The thirty-inch plasma cutter extended from the left arm of her knuckledragger like a burning sword. Before the mechanized Squidy on the other side of the unarmored ones could discharge its heavy weapon, she pivoted and slashed at it with the 9000 degree, magnetically focused plasma blade.
Her first, burning stroke cut its weapon in half. Her second one cut the alien across the armored midsection. It sprayed gas and blue snow out the wound and fell to the hull.
Hollis slapped Ram on the shoulder and pointed in the other direction, to their 3 o'clock, up over the lip of the crater. "It's another wave!" This one was bigger than the last. Fifty Squidies in exosuits came squidging at them in a low firing line. They weren't armored, but they all had handheld masers that could turn a man to ash before his suit even burned away.
Ram twisted the dial on the antique Honma & Voss pistol, rose and swept the beam of focused x-rays across the enemy, firing the terror weapon at maximum discharge. The beam cut at least ten Squidies across their tendril legs or bodies. They fell to the hull and slid while the severed limbs whipped and sprayed copper blue like headless snakes. Ram fired again, but the gun had overheated. He almost threw it at them.
